Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created The Incredible Hulk comic book in 1962.

The Hulk doesn’t say a whole lot in The Avengers. Iron Man spews sarcastic put-downs, Captain America speechifies about the duties of a true patriot, Thor hashes out exotic sibling rivalry issues and Black Widow deadpans her way through reams of exposition.

From a distance, zipping from skyscraper to skyscraper, he could be an enraged housefly. Up close, it’s King Kong with a bad haircut. Whatever the mode, this CGI-generated Avenger makes high-tech weaponry and sophisticated strategizing utterly irrelevant. He’s a smash-and-grab superhero fluent in the visual language of brute destruction.

Audiences love it. Mark Ruffalo’s motion-capture version of the Hulk has played so strongly to international crowds ahead of The Avengers‘ Friday opening in the United States that Marvel Entertainment is already talking about plans to create yet another standalone Hulk movie in 2015.

In Joss Whedon’s action romp, scientist Bruce Banner — a guy who’s suffered from significant anger-management problems in the past — is introduced as a nice guy treating impoverished children in some Third World village. The gamma rays that long ago transformed him into the Hulk mean nobody knows when he’ll go through his next out-of-control transformation, when the doctor’s tightly wound neurosis will end and the oh-so-cathartic mayhem will begin.

This Hulk’s on-screen outbursts satisfy because The Avengers gets right what two previous films failed to understand. Yes, Hulk is an impossibly ferocious green-skinned freak, but to fully savor the green giant’s id, audiences must first connect with the creature’s everyschmuck ego essence.

“Bruce Banner himself is someone who has not been [properly] portrayed until there was Mark Ruffalo,” Avengers writer-director Whedon told Wired. “The relationship between [Bruce Banner] and … the Hulk and what we get to do with the Hulk when he finally shows up, I feel like people are going to be like, ‘Well thank you, I’ve been waiting for that.'”

Ruffalo worked closely with industrial Light & Magic to create the Hulk’s performance-capture foundation, Whedon says. “When Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk … Mark did all the reference and the animators took it a step further. Mark encouraged them to. He’s like, ‘Look, you can’t look at me going ‘grrrrrrr‘ and then just animate that. You guys have to own this character as much as I do.'”

Whedon asked Ruffalo to prepare for the role by checking out Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno‘s 1978 to 1982 The Incredible Hulk TV series, but he didn’t even bother to screen earlier Hulk movies for the actor.

In 2003’s lethargic Hulk, Eric Bana spent so much time in a slow-burning funk that by the time his mopey rocket scientist went ballistic, it was hard to much care about his feud with the military forces conspiring to shut down his research.

Five years later, as The Incredible Hulk, Edward Norton played Banner so close to the vest that his conflict-averse doctor seemed barely connected to the rip-roaring behemoth who tangles with the Abmonination on the streets of Manhattan.

With those disappointments in mind, skeptics groaned at the news that Ruffalo would play Movie Hulk No. 3. The 44-year-old actor specialized in portraying rumpled, low-key charmers in films like The Brothers Bloom and The Kids Are All Right, but had yet to throw his weight around in a macho action flick.

“I’ve never had a role more scrutinized and criticized before I’d shot a single frame.”

Ruffalo realized he had doubters. “I knew what my responsibility was, or I felt it just by going online and reading some of the fanboy responses to the announcement that I was playing the next version of Bruce Banner,” he said at a recent Beverly Hills press conference. “That was a mistake. I will never do it again. I’ve never had a role more scrutinized and criticized before I’d shot a single frame.”

As it turns out, Ruffalo understood on a fundamental level the key to Hulk’s appeal. “We’re all told to be so well-behaved, and we’re all, I think, bursting at the same time to let it rip,” he said. “When Bruce Banner gets that moment, people get joy from seeing that. It’s a great way to blow off steam.”

Hulk’s primal allure extends beyond the Cold War zeitgeist that informed the character’s genesis. Introduced in 1962, co-creator Stan Lee conceived the creature as a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde split personality merged with Frankenstein’s monster. Global anxieties about a cataclysmic nuclear war set the stage for a scientist who’d accidentally exposed himself to monster-making radiation while detonating a gamma ray bomb.

Themes rooted in science’s potential for destruction framed many of the comic book storylines, but the Hulk has resonated in a more general way over the past six decades.

Hippies ranked him with Bob Dylan as a counterculture icon; rappers including Dr. Dre and Ludacris referenced him in their rhymes; conceptual artist Jeff Koons likened the creature to a “guardian God” in his 2007 series of Hulk Elvis prints. Hulk director Ang Lee said he identified as an Asian-American with the character’s “subcurrent of repression.”

And now, in The Avengers, Bruce Banner and his brutish alter ego cut through the laser beams, high-tech fortresses and fancy talk with irresistible directness. Point him toward forces of evil, then stand back.

“I don’t have an armored suit,” he says to Iron Man. “I’m an exposed nerve!”

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